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“OpenAI Engineer Charged With Bugging OpenAI's Executive Conference Room”

• An OpenAI engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Fri Oct 9 and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. The complaint was made public Tue Oct 13, per CBS News. • Prosecutors say a recording device was found Sept 30 plugged into a USB port behind a TV in an executive conference room, concealed in toilet paper and installed about two days earlier, per CBS News and the San Francisco Standard. • Per the complaint, a chatbot account tied to his spouse, sharing identifiers with his own account, asked between Sept 24 and 30 how to "build a continuous audio recorder" and "encrypt the SD card," per the San Francisco Standard. • On Oct 5 he was seen entering the room and looking behind the TV, and security found a second, similar device in a bag he left behind, per CBS News. • OpenAI says it "used our models to understand the device and where it had come from," then called the FBI and fired him. It says it has "no indications" he accessed or took model weights, source code or customer data, per Fox Business and CBS News. • His attorney, William Pernik, cautioned against "jumping to conclusions at this very early stage of the case." No foreign government involvement has been alleged. A detention hearing is set for Oct 19. • For a small business: the threat came from inside, through a $24 gadget and a USB port.